by Marvin Ramírez
“Whoever controls the value of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce…” President James A. Garfield
The economy is in shamble, but as long as the mainstream media keep making us believe that things are being worked out, by projecting a climate of ‘no worry, Obama is going to fix it,” the population is going to find itself unprepared for the worse that is coming.
I recently saw a newspaper headline that said: “consume less, export more, and elaborates on some of the causes,” of the real financial crisis.
Are we doing that? Of course not. We are being duped into believing that more bailouts will solve the financial and therefore the credit crisis, when in fact, according to some of the best financial analysts and economists, we are sinking, and no more credit system is going to save the ship.
But it will be up to the United States, as the global leader, to pull the planet out of this tailspin and, to do so, experts say, North Americans will have to rebuild the engines that drive our economic growth. They say we’ll have to throttle back on consumption and rev up production, borrow less and export more. We’ll also have to figure out how to supervise global financial markets so they don’t melt down again and make sure that, when prosperity returns, it is more broadly shared, writes Tom Abate, Chronicle staff writer.
“For over a quarter-century the global economy has been driven by U.S. consumers spending aggressively beyond their incomes by borrowing,” Mark Zandi, with Moody’s Economy.com, said. “It will take time to adjust,” he was quoted saying in the Chronicle.
As long as we continue using money with no value, our future will continue growing dark.
A very brief history of the gold standard.
If you would like to learn about the history of money in detail, there is an excellent site called ‘A Comparative Chronology of Money,’ which details the important places and dates in monetary history. During most of the 1800s the United States had a bimetallic system of money, however it was essentially on a gold standard as very little silver was traded. A true gold standard came to fruition in 1900 with the passage of the Gold Standard Act.
The gold standard effectively came to an end in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlawed private gold ownership (except for the purposes of jewelry). The Bretton Woods System, enacted in 1946 created a system of fixed exchange rates that allowed governments to sell their gold to the United States treasury at the price of $35/ounce. “The Bretton Woods system ended on August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon ended trading of gold at the fixed price of $35/ounce.
At that point for the first time in history, formal links between the major world currencies and real commodities were severed”. The gold standard has not been used in any major economy since that time.
A little bit more than a year ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that OPEC’s members have expressed interest in converting their cash reserves into a currency other than the depreciating U.S. dollar, which he called a “worthless piece of paper.”
An internet commentator responded: “And he’s absolutely right. Anyone who knows the history of the Federal Reserve knows the dollar has dropped in value since 1913 from 100 cents to less than 4 cents. This is fiat currency for you. When you make something out of nothing, it then becomes worth nothing. Meanwhile the central banks get REAL assets, such as natural resources and property, as collateral on the monopoly money they lend to govern- ments.
Fiat currency only helps the elite. The sooner people realize this, the sooner we can turn things around in this society for the better.
Another commentator said: In Section 8 – Powers of Congress: “The Congress shall have Power … To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”
U.S. Congress delegated this power to a private central bank called the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. The same year Income Tax was established to pay the Federal Reserve for the interest owed on debt.
We don’t need the Federal Reserve Bank to continue printing our currency, and then lending it to our government with interest.
The U.S. Government can print all the money it needs without ever going into debt or having to pay interest on debt. Meanwhile, the infrastructure created would generate profits that could be used to eliminate the majority of taxes. Moreover, value-backed money would not cause infl ation as long as government projects paid for by the newly created money would expend the economy. President Abraham Lincoln issued such money. They were called Greenbacks and they were in circulation as late as 1996, said the online commentator.
We all need to unite and force our Congress and Senate members, to abolish the Federal Reserve Bank, which is the real cause of our misery and the U.S. bankruptcy.
